Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Prosecutors and a state agency have reached a settlement designed to get mentally ill criminal defendants out of local jails and into the state hospital for treatment.

Prosecutors Iris Eytan and Marcus Lock had asked Denver District Judge Martin Egelhoff to hold the superintendent of the state hospital and the executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services in contempt for failing to treat the inmates....

Specifically, the special prosecutors had charged that the state was violating the constitutional rights of two categories of inmates - those who had been found incompetent and those awaiting mental- health evaluations.

Late last year, they claimed that there were as many as 77 Colorado defendants, who were found incompetent to stand trial, awaiting admission to the state mental hospital. Many of the inmates had been in jails for months despite court orders saying they were to be moved to the hospital.Read the Post article here

and this one here..outlines the problems associated with people with people who have mental illness and what some cities are doing.

The Army veteran was homeless and disoriented when he was arrested for burglary in Boulder County. Prior to 1999, he would have been sentenced, served his term and been released from jail. Then, most likely, he would have been returned to jail for another offense or for a technical violation of parole, such as not keeping an appointment with his parole officer. He would have joined the legions of mentally ill going in and out of jail in what amounts to a revolving door